The still life as a pictorial kind with whole share finds its origin in Greece. According to the testimony of Pline the Old one, the most famous follower of the kind would have been certain Piraeicos, author of tables representing of the craftsmen to work, the animals or the
" provisions and other food products of the same type ", which make think of the xenia, these present of food which the fortunate Greeks placed at the disposal of their hosts. Already ancient still life in revêt not less sometimes a moral resonance: the combat of lobster and octopus, visible with the center of the splendid marine mosaic of the villa of Fauna with Pompéi, the dead partridge accompanied by two ripe grenades, which composes the subject of a fresco of Herculanum, is, at the same time as invite épicuriennes to enjoy the beauty of nature and the pleasures the life, of disconcerting recalls of the precariousness of a very provisional human condition. But the still life seems to have disappeared in painting before even the fall from the Roman Empire. The chaos born of the multiple wars carried out against cruel tribes returned the living conditions of the more difficult Romans and caused a degradation of manners which gradually made forget the refinement of the years fastes. Moreover, Christendom imposed to the Romans different standards of life, and certainly more austere. During more than thousand years, Western civilization did not accept any more the representation of the motionless things… With the Middle Ages in enluminures of the monks who illustrate the crowned texts and the breviaries the still life is used at ends of decoration, for enjoliver and enluminer the
text…